“We started this for two reasons,” JoEllyn Klepacki, the assistant director of education at the Missouri Humane Society, told ABC News today. “Dogs in a shelter environment exhibit a lot of signs of anxiety and show stress signals, so we wanted to do something to comfort them, and we have a lot of children in our area who are really engaged and they ask, ‘How can I help? How can I make a difference?'”

The kids, ages 6 through 15, go through a training program that teaches them to understand the perspective of dogs in a shelter environment and how to read the dogs’ body language.

Children can then bring their own books to read to the dogs or borrow from the shelter’s extensive library of animal-related books.